Options. Imagine having a thousand options laid out right on the table for you, beautifully ornated. Pretty picture, huh? At a situation like that, you’d most likely be dealing with the ordeal of having a baffled mind, going back and forth on your decisions, about which to pick. Now, what if someone told you, you couldn’t have any of them…
I remember the first time I was told, “Sorry, but these options aren’t available to you.” They said I couldn't have it because I wasn’t one of them. They said I had to be an American. As someone who had lived most of her teens vicariously through Christina Yang, I believed one could have it all with their unquenchable thirst to be the best but little did I know, that in the world where I live, the only thirst that could be sated without being an American, is the thirst for water and the only thing one could be best at, is at swigging it.
Back in high school, the only class I never skipped was the one that taught human biology. I found it unreservedly titillating as to how the human brain works. I would primarily show up only to get more of the parts that read the brain. I loved to know. However, as years went by, I figured my passion for this mystic organ wasn’t going to go away.It is then when I knew I had to be a neurosurgeon and dig further into that brain until there was no more to find.
Following that, the first few months, I was constantly put down for wanting a career as a surgeon. I was told a girl couldn’t do it, it was too tough.
Currently, I have been dealing with something quite alike, but a little more intricate and slightly more painful. This time, I was told, I could not be a surgeon because I did not have the blue passport or the green card. Funny, how the colours get to decide my future and I don’t!
I am studying day and night, giving it my 100% to have that perfect GPA up on my resume. I am still paying tuition five times the original amount just so I can have the degree. I am doing it all just to have them say to me that I am not eligible to apply for UC San Francisco medical school (which just so happens to my dream school) or any other public medical school for that matter. However, I do have private schools to look at, although their statistics show a 1% acceptance of the international students and the tuition for my first year in a private medical school would, very easily, cost me two kidneys, my lungs, and the brain, maybe the eyes and the heart too. Yay for me? I guess not.
Simply put, if you are an international student in the United States, you’d know that the word “student” isn’t a fully functional term unless it has the word “domestic” before it.
Options are slim to none and the journey is too long and rough but then what am I still doing here? Two reasons. First, US is home to me. This place, the people, they have never made me feel like I don’t belong here. If anything, I feel more at ease here than I ever did back home. Second, because this pseudo-Yang is not a quitter.
